Pete McMartin: The redeeming arc of Matt Ross’s life

PETE MCMARTIN, Vancouver Sun Columnist12.18.2012

Matt Ross, 33, with wife Sarah and daughter Teagan 2-1/2, living life to the fullest. Ross who who has a troubled youth is now a mental heath care worker with Strathcona Mental Health. And he and Sarah operate a specialized transition home for older children in need.Mark van Manen
/ Vancouver Sun

Matt Ross, 33, with wife Sarah and daughter Teagan 2-1/2, living life to the fullest. Ross who who has a troubled youth is now a mental heath care worker with Strathcona Mental Health. And he and Sarah operate a specialized transition home for older children in need.Mark van Manen
/ Vancouver Sun

Matt Ross, 33, with wife Sarah and daughter Teagan 2-1/2, living life to the fullest. Ross who who has a troubled youth is now a mental heath care worker with Strathcona Mental Health. And he and Sarah operate a specialized transition home for older children in need.Mark van Manen
/ Vancouver Sun

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Matt Ross is 33 now, and has been the subject of my column twice before — in 2001 and in 2003. He was in his early 20s then.

He had been a street kid. He had an alcoholic mother and an absent father, and he left home for the first time when he was 16. He ended up in Toronto’s Covenant House, a crisis shelter for teens. He wore out his welcome there after drinking and doing drugs. For two years, he drifted between shelters and the street. He sold drugs to make a living. He tried going back to school and failed.

Frustrated and fed up, Matt left Toronto and followed his father out to Vancouver, where he had started a new family. Matt hitchhiked across the country. Their reunion did not go well. They fought. Matt left after two months.

He needed a place to stay, and he found it in Vancouver’s Covenant House, the sister shelter to the one in Toronto. At that time, the Covenant House shelter at Drake and Seymour only had 22 beds, but Matt was given a temporary spot. He tried a second reunion with his father. Again, it did not go well. Again, he moved out. He found shelter where he could, sometimes on friends’ couches, sometimes at Covenant House.

It was around then when I first met Matt. Covenant House was just opening its new Rights of Passage transitional building at 326 West Pender, where street kids could live in their own apartments for up to two years. Candidates for the apartments were expected to hold down a job of at least 30 hours a week while completing high school. They would have to pay rent, observe a curfew and abstain from drugs and alcohol. In return, they got counselling and 24-hour supervision.

Matt was its first resident.

I wrote that first column about Matt then, and about his hope for a better life.

I wrote a second column about him in 2003, when I revisited Matt to see how he was doing. He had left Rights of Passage and moved into his own apartment. He had gone back to school and enrolled in a counselling course for drug and alcohol addiction at Vancouver Community College. He got a job at Covenant House helping street kids his own age. He travelled around the province doing advocacy workshops for the Ministry for Children and Youth. And he was working with the Native Health Association, doing supervisory shifts at safe houses.

He was 24, and seemed on his way.

And that was the last, I thought, I would see of Matt Ross.

Last week, I was at the Ukrainian Cultural Centre hall, where I had been invited to help out at the annual Christmas dinner the staff of the Strathcona Mental Health team puts on for its clients. My son is a case manager with the team, and at one point, we were on our way back to the kitchen when we passed a group of people talking.

David stopped and said: “Dad, you remember Matt, don’t you?”

And there was Matt. We looked at each other, a little surprised, and shook hands. He was an adult now — articulate, self-possessed, without that diffident air of someone still finding his way.

I asked him what he was doing, and he said he was a mental health care worker with the Strathcona team. He had a caseload of 70 clients, many of them dual-diagnosis cases with both severe mental health and addiction issues. His desk was next to my son’s.

He was married now, he said. He met his wife while working at one of the Native Health Association safe houses, where she had been on staff. They had a two-year-old daughter.

They were living, he said, in the Commercial Drive area in a house owned by the Ministry of Children and Family Development. It was a semi-independent transitional home for children and teens in need, Matt said, and he and his wife ran the home.

“In effect, we’re specialized foster parents, and at the moment, we have four kids in their teens — two boys and two girls.”

They had done it for seven years, Matt said, and in that time had helped foster 35 kids. A few had lapsed, he said, and ended up back on the street, but most of them had made progress.

“Our impression so far is, kids that come into our home typically graduate from high school, which is fantastic, which is our goal.”

I asked him — considering his origins — how he felt about the arc of his life.

“Well, it’s fascinating, isn’t it? To go from where I’ve been to where I’m going. I couldn’t imagine a better place to be right now.

“Not a day goes by when I don’t think I have the best possible life I could have.”

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Pete McMartin: The redeeming arc of Matt Ross’s life

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